Book Review

By Derryll White

MacDonald, John D. (1964).  The Deep Blue Good-By.

A lady is a very special happening, so scented and delicate and breathless and totally immaculate. She wore a filmy something that tied at the throat and parted readily, presenting the warm length of her, the incredibly smooth texture of her, to my awakening embrace.   – John D. MacDonald

The Deep Blue Good-By is the beginning novel of a remarkable series based on Travis McGee, a handsome, carefree Florida boat bum. McGee is the culmination of a character developed and refined in several of MacDonald’s earlier short stories. MacDonald goes on to make him the focus of more than 20 subsequent novels. So, in many ways ‘The Deep Blue Good-By’ is John D. MacDonald’s entrance into an amazing career that spawned more than 65 novels and gave America and the world a new window into the gross economic rape and environmental degradation that post-WWII capitalism had spawned.

MacDonald is very good at looking at how people operate, what makes them tick. His characters expose the frailties we all harbour as well as the strengths we sometimes don’t even know we have. Travis McGee is a beach bum type with a heart that takes in the disadvantaged and the exploited, and pursues their exploiters. He is Florida’s Don Quixote jousting with power and evil.

This is definitely a story of innocence lost. MacDonald is gifted in putting into words the story of the predator everyone should be aware of, and on guard against. He doesn’t spare the lazy, soft individuals who constitute the potential prey, or the society, which generates the conditions that allow such predator-prey relationships to flourish. I am constantly surprised by how contemporary this 50-year-old story sounds.

I really enjoyed this novel and intend to read all of MacDonald’s works if I live long enough. Lotus Books has found a source for some of the reprints in the ‘Hard Case Crime’ series, so John D. MacDonald is available to readers.

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Excerpts from the novel:

I LOVE YOU – These are the playmate years and they are demonstrably fraudulent. The scene is reputed to be acrawl with adorable amoral bunnies to whom sex is a pleasant social favor. The new culture. And they are indeed present and available, in exhausting quantity, but there is a curious tastelessness about them. A woman who does not guard and treasure herself cannot be of very much value to anyone else. They become a pretty little convenience, like as guest towel. And the cute little things they say, and their dainty little squeals of pleasure and release are as contrived as the embroidered initials on the guest towels. Only a woman of pride, complexity and emotional tension is genuinely worth the act of love, and there are only two ways to get yourself one of them. Either you lie, and stain the relationship with your own sense of guile, or you accept the involvement, the emotional responsibility, the permanence she must by nature crave. I love you can be said only two ways.

THE EXPLOITED – “I guess there are a lot of people like me.  We react too soon or too late or not at all. We’re jumpy people, and we don’t seem to belong here. We’re victims maybe. The Junior Allens are so sure of themselves and so sure of us. They know how to use us, how to take us further than we wish before we know what to do about it.” She frowned. “And they seem to know by instinct exactly how to trade upon our concealed desire to accept that kind of domination. I wanted to make a life down here, Trav. I was lonely. I was trying to be friendly. I was trying to be a part of something.”

EVIL – Love him, understand him, forgive him, lead him shyly to Freud or Jesus.

Or else take the contemporarily untenable position that evil, undiluted by any hint of childhood trauma, does exist in the world, exists for its own precise sake, the pustular bequest from the beast, as inexplicable as Belsen.

CREDIT CARDS – The cards are handy but I hate to use them. I always feel a little like a Thoreau armed with a Leica and a bird book. They are the little fingers of reality, reaching for your throat. A man with a credit card is in hock to his own image of himself.

EVENTUALITY – Bugs would eat the wax. Chew the old canvas. And one day there would be a mutation, and we will have new ones that can digest concrete, dissolve steel and suck up all the acid puddles, fatten on magic plastics, lick their slow way through glass.  Then the cities will tumble and man will be chased back into the sea from which he came….

YOUTH – They are the displaced persons of our emotional culture. They are ravenous for romance, yet settle for what they call making out. Their futile acne-pitted men drift out of high school into a world so surfeited with unskilled labor there is competition for bag-boy jobs in the supermarkets.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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